Jan of the Windmill eBook

“And we behindhand in more quarters than one,”
continued the miller, prudently ignoring his wife’s
tears and remonstrances, “and a dear season
coming on, and an uncertain trade that keeps a man
idle by days together, and here’s ten shillings
a week dropped into our laps, so to speak. Ten
shillings a week—­regular and sartin.
No less now, and no more hereafter, the governor
said. Them were his words.”

“What’s ten shilling a week to me, and
my child dead and gone?” moaned the mother,
in reply.

“What’stenshillings A
weektoyou?” cried the windmiller,
who was fairly exasperated, in tones so loud that
they were audible in the dwelling room, where the
stranger, standing by the three-legged table, stroked
his lips twice or thrice with his hand, as if to smooth
out a cynical smile which strove to disturb their decorous
and somewhat haughty compression. “What’s
ten shilling a week to you? Why, it’s
food to you, and drink to you, and firing to you,
and boots for the children’s feet. Look
here, my woman. You’ve had a sore affliction,
but that’s not to say you’re to throw good
luck in the dirt for a whimsey. This matter’s
settled.”

And the miller strode back into the inner room, whilst
his wife sat upon a sack of barley, wringing her hands,
and moaning, “I couldn’t do my duty by
un, maester, I couldn’t do my duty by un.”

This she repeated at intervals, with her apron over
her face, as before; and then, suddenly aware that
her husband had left her, she hurried into the inner
room to plead her own cause. It was too late.
The strangers had gone. The miller was not there,
and the baby lay on the end of the press bedstead,
wailing as bitterly as the mother herself.

It had been placed there, with a big bundle of clothes
by it, before the miller came back, and he had found
it so. He found the stranger too, with his hat
on his head, and his cloak fastened, glancing from
time to time at the child, and then withdrawing his
glance hastily, and looking forcedly round at the
meagre furnishing of the miller’s room, and
then back at the little bundle on the bed, and away
again. The woman stood with her back to the press-bed,
her striped shawl drawn tightly round her, and her
hands folded together as closely as her long lip pressed
the heavy one below.

“Is it settled?” asked the man.

“It is, sir,” said the miller. “You’ll
excuse my missus being as she is, but it’s fretting
for the child we’ve a lost” —

“I understand, I understand,” said the
stranger, hastily. He was pulling back the rings
of a silk netted purse, which he had drawn mechanically
from his pocket, and which, from some sudden start
of his, fell chinking on to the floor. Whatever
the thought was which startled him, he thought it
so sharply that he looked up in fear that he had said
it aloud. But he had not spoken, and the miller
had no other expression than that of an eager satisfaction
on his face as the stranger counted out the gold by
the flaring light of the tallow candle.